The 1935 song “Faccetta Nera,” a paean to the Fascist imperialist enterprise in Africa, addresses the “little black face” that is the anonymous Abyssinian woman, an object of Italian colonial desire. This jaunty march with its suggestive miscegenation proclaims a gendered liberation of African women with the line “our law is slavery of love” (la legge nostra è schiavitù d’amore). The song was made famous by tenor Carlo Buti and eventually became a staple of festa band repertoires among the diaspora. In contemporary Italy black women are routinely taunted and humiliated with this Fascist-era tune.

The song is but one example of the myriad ways in which the body figures in discourses and cultural productions concerning Italy’s histories and identities, within and well beyond the country’s geopolitical boundaries. This interdisciplinary conference recognizes the body in its literal, metaphorical, and hybrid constitutions as found in the modern nation state of Italy, the larger Italian diaspora, and among former colonies. It builds on the array of seminal work on body politics mainly developed in women’s and gender studies where corporeal imaginaries construct and reposition identity and agency.

Italy and italianità, with its complex position within a Western hegemony—connected to colonialism, transnational migration, and larger discourses of power—is a particularly interesting locus for focusing a series of critical interventions around the body.

FRIDAY, APRIL 27, 2018

9:30–10:45 am

Corporeal Inscriptions

The Body Damned, the Body Saved, the Body Glorified: Portrayals of the Body in Dante’s Commedia, ALFRED CRUDALE, University of Rhode Island

Paola Masino’s Short Story “A Modo Loro”: A Critique of the Effects of Fascism’s Gender Policies and the Demographic Campaign on Italian Women, TRISTANA RORANDELLI, Sarah Lawrence College

A Shade of Black in Italian Women’s Writing: Body, Food, and Identity in Igiaba Scego’s “Salsicce,” FRANCESCA CALAMITA, University of Virginia